This week, as it happens, there's been an unusual quantity of good news out of Washington D.C.— not great, throw-your-hat-in-the-air news; but hopeful news, news about our government moving in the right direction—above all, on immigration.

It ends chain migration. At present, if you are a citizen or legal permanent resident, you can sponsor your parents, your siblings, and your adult children for permanent residence. No longer: Under the proposed reform, it'll be spouse and dependent children only.

It ends the so-called "diversity lottery," which gives permanent residence to 50,000 random people from anywhere, by lottery from the millions who apply–14½ million in 2015, the last year we have numbers for. Almost half of those were from Africa.

It caps refugee numbers at 50,000 in any year.

Applicants for permanent residence would be graded on a points system, with points decided by age, education credentials, English-language skills, professional awards, investment resources, and job offers.

Guest workers would have to show job offers paying more than what is being paid to local Americans.

Those are highlights. You can read the entire bill at Senator Perdue's congressional website. [PDF]It's called the RAISE Bill: R-A-I-S-E, stands for "Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy."

From my point of view, the proposed bill is a curate's egg: good in parts.

Cutting back chain migration to just spouse and dependent children, for instance, is a very sensible reform. Likewise dumping the horrible, stupid "diversity lottery." Diversity, above the minimal salt-in-the-stew level, creates nothing but trouble. We can’t taste the stew, we've dumped so much salt in it.

There are some nits to pick, though. The refugee cap is way too high, for instance. Fifty thousand a year? Here are government figures for the actual number of refugees admitted in fiscal years 2016, -15, -14, -13, and -12, in thousands: 85, 70, 70, 70, 58. So fifty thousand is a very modest reduction.

Given that, as I have explained, refugees and ourselves are all better off if they're parked in countries with similar cultures; and given also that, as documented in detail by Ann Coulter in ¡Adios America!, the refugee program is addled with fraud, the proper ceiling here: ZERO.

The guest-worker reform would quickly be gamed by smart immigration lawyers, just as they have gamed the present system, where employers are supposed to show they can't find an American worker to hire. Employers go through the motions on that, but everyone knows it's bogus.

Most problematic in the President's proposal: the points-based system–giving permanent residence to the smartest, best-credentialed foreigners.

The long-term result of that, as VDARE.com has occasionally noted, is that the legacy nation might end up working for an overclass of smart Asians. That's a recipe for racial resentment and civic disorder here in America. (I mean, of course, yet more racial resentment and yet more civic disorder).

It also strips poor countries of their most talented people. I couldn't personally care less about that, but most Americans are more moralistically inclined than I am. People who claim to fret about world poverty should be asked why it's good to enrich America by making poor countries poorer.

My ideal immigration policy is minimalist: a policy that serves Americans, and one that Americans can understand:

New permanent residents? Don't need any. Exceptions: spouse and dependent children of current citizens. Guys who've helped us overseas. Solzhenitsyn.

Temporary guest workers? Don't need any. Exceptions: that concert pianist, some world-class physicist teaching on exchange at a U.S. university. A few thousand similar cases.

Tourists and businessfolk on temporary visas with no right to work? Sure, carefully monitored on entry and exit, easily done with modern data management and i.d. systems.

Students? In very limited numbers.

All that said, I'll thank the President and the two Senators for this bill. It's pointed in the right direction, away from our present chaotic, corrupt, and nation-destroying system.

Best of all, it opens up the issue of immigration so that Establishment figures have to discuss it. Which they hate to do; and which, as CNN’s Jim Acosta showed in that clip with Stephen Miller, they do so excrutiatingly badly, it makes great TV and gets citizens talking, and helps dispel the clouds of ignorance. Senator Lindsey Graham, who, has already declared his outrage over the bill, is the very model and archetype of an Antiwhite Capitalist.

This proposed bill makes a mighty crack in the dam. There's no going back to the regime of blanket ignorance and sentimentality on immigration.

This ignorance has been willed. People–including educated and influential people, non-sinister people who are not directly benefiting from the scams, would rather not hear about, not talk about immigration. It's radioactive.

Mind if I quote myself here? I'm writing on VDARE.com two years ago. Quote:

In the year or so prior to presidential elections in 2004, 2008, and 2012, GOP hopefuls would drop by at National Review to share their thoughts with us. The hopeful would meet with a dozen or so editors and contributors in the magazine's library.

I think it was always the case that I was the only person in the room ever to ask a candidate about immigration policy. As I did so, the other staffers present would squirm and examine their fingernails. I recall thinking, time and again: "What's the matter with you guys? It's just a policy." (The hopefuls were invariably clueless.)

Ah, the melancholy of being right too soon! We're like those "premature antifascists" of the 1930s, who opposed Hitler and Mussolini before it was respectable to. Prophets without honor.

The general level of ignorance is still deep, though, even among the licensed commentariat. Let me give you an example: columnist and Fox News talking head Charles Krauthammer.

Yeah, yeah; I can hear your eyes rolling already: cucky neocon Israel-first GOP establishment front man. Scanning back through my archived columns, my own very occasional references to Krauthammer have been in that general area, too.

Recently, though, I've been warming to the guy. In his appearances on Tucker Carlson's show, he has said mostly sensible things.

Whether this is a cynical trimming of sails or honest enlightenment, I can't say, not having paid close enough attention to Krauthammer the previous twenty years. It's a change of direction, regardless, and I'm disposed to be charitable. We are promised that more joy shall be in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth, than over ninety and nine just persons who need no repentance.

Here was Dr. Krauthammer speaking on Fox Wednesday this week, about the President's proposed reforms of immigration law.

Why does the Post think we are "desperately in need of a guest-worker program" when we already have 21 such programs?

Visa categories are subject to occasional changes, so the actual number of guest-worker programs now, three years after I wrote that, may not be exactly 21. Possibly it's 20 or 23. By all means check for yourself on the USCIS website; I have no heart to do so.

Suffice it to say, with utter certainty, the number of our guest-worker programs is greater than zero.

Yet Charles Krauthammer, a very intelligent man, never heard of those programs: not the E-3 visa nor the O-1, not the P-1A nor the H-1B, none of them. Like the New York Post editorialists, he thinks it is bright and spiffy–original, perhaps daring–to propose the U.S.A. having a guest-worker program … WHEN WE ALREADY HAVE A WHOLE BULGING FILE CABINET OF THE DARN THINGS AND HAVE HAD FOR DECADES. I came to the U.S.A. in 1985 on a guest-worker visa. HEL-LO?

Sentimentality? Dostoyevsky described one of his characters as "evil and sentimental." I wouldn't myself say that sentimentality is always evil, but that's the way to bet.

It's sure the way to bet when listening to immigration talk. You know what I'm referring to: huddled masses, wretched refuse, my grandpa landed with just a hundred dollars in his pocket. Famine ships, pogroms, Ellis Island … you know all the heartstring-pullers that get dragged out in service of antiwhite capitalism.

All that sentimentality is in service of a poisonous nation-killing scam. Hence the pleasure–the ecstatic, joyful pleasure–of watching Stephen Miller make CNN propagandist Jim Acosta bend over and squeal like a pig

Immigration policy is just policy, like interstate highway management or farm price supports. It should be arranged to the advantage of the American people, coldly and realistically, not in compliance with myths and poems.

If you, my listeners, can get the Constitution changed and elect me President, I promise that on Day One I will order the dynamiting of Ellis Island.